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by gigama 874 days ago
"The detective’s request to run a DNA-generated estimation of a suspect’s face through facial recognition tech has not previously been reported. Found in a trove of hacked police records published by the transparency collective Distributed Denial of Secrets, it appears to be the first known instance of a police department attempting to use facial recognition on a face algorithmically generated from crime-scene DNA."

"It’s really just junk science to consider something like this," Jennifer Lynch, general counsel at civil liberties nonprofit the Electronic Frontier Foundation, tells WIRED. Running facial recognition with unreliable inputs, like an algorithmically generated face, is more likely to misidentify a suspect than provide law enforcement with a useful lead, she argues. "There’s no real evidence that Parabon can accurately produce a face in the first place," Lynch says. "It’s very dangerous, because it puts people at risk of being a suspect for a crime they didn’t commit."
1 comments
mrguyorama 873 days ago
Police LOVE using BS "science" in their work. So many "forensic methods" are just bogus, completely made up by one guy who tours the country selling his "method" to police departments. Most of them are even regularly used in court, despite being utter trash. As long as you can get an "Expert" to take some money to say it in court, a judge will allow it, and allow juries to believe it is as true as cops say.
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rossant 873 days ago
That is true for a number of forensic methods, indeed [1]. For the sole issue of the controversial diagnosis of abusive head trauma (one forensic method among many other, which specifically involves sudden infant deaths or collapses), there may be thousands of wrongful convictions. Courts deserve better.

[1] https://cifsjustice.org/about-cifs/reform-in-forensic-scienc...

[2] https://www.cambridgeblog.org/2023/05/a-journey-into-the-sha...

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37650402

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Atheros 873 days ago
And so trivial to falsify. In this case, put your own DNA in and see that the picture output doesn't look like you.

For fiber analysis, give the expert some fibers of known origin and see if they get it right. Give them some hair from one of 200 people; see if they can tell who it's from. None of that got done for decades. Police and judges clearly do not care.

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FireBeyond 873 days ago
> completely made up by one guy who tours the country selling his "method" to police departments

... oftentimes that one guy is an ex-cop. No bias there.

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